Light and Darkness in Landscape Paintings by the Wolf Man

In the one hundred and one years since Freud published his famous case history of Sergei Pankejeff, known in subsequent psychoanalytic literature as the Wolf Man, revisionist understandings have steadily appeared reinterpreting both Freud's understanding of his patient's condition and the condition itself. It is not at all surprising that these reinterpretations follow and express the general evolution of psychoanalysis during these same one hundred and one years. For example, Harold Blum's 1974 interpretation of the Wolf Man's personality as borderline in “The Borderline Childhood of the Wolf Man,” is lucid and compelling yet nonetheless epitomizes that era's reification of details for that category of disorder. Without citing additional examples of revisionist interpretations that can be understood from within psychoanalysis' history, it is nonetheless also interesting to note that some of the revisionist body of thought and opinion is historically conditioned by forces outside the history of psychoanalysis. For example, one can understand Lacan's various proclamations about the case in relation to his social context in the post-war, post-occupation era of early 1950s France,1 and Lawrence Johnson's The Wolf